The man was in a position where pulling the trigger would mean shooting between his own legs, while the muzzle pointed at him seemed incapable of missing his face or chest. Even with Seo Jihyeok aiming a gun at the man’s side, he spoke.
“W-We survive under any circumstances.”
······Impressive. If it had been me, I would have been too terrified to say a word.
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life sitting down to shit?”
At Baek Aeyeong’s voice, even my back prickled despite hearing it from a distance. As the muzzle of Baek Aeyeong’s gun lowered from the man’s head and chest to aim at his lower abdomen, the man gave up his weapon and raised both hands. Sin Haeryang slowly switched arms and took the gun the man had abandoned. Seo Jihyeok looked at Baek Aeyeong and shuddered.
“Ugh······ You have no idea what kind of threat that is.”
“Is that my problem?”
Hearing Baek Aeyeong’s icy voice behind me, I approached the man collapsed beside us. As I moved toward the man, who appeared to have fallen unconscious, Seo Jihyeok stopped me.
“His carotid artery’s been severed. He’s one hundred percent dead.······ Hey. Did you come out before I even called you?”
I had come out because I thought Baek Aeyeong had told us to, but apparently that wasn’t the case.
“I thought······ I thought you were going to capture them without killing them.”
“······ That would have been possible if my legs were still in one piece.”
I looked at the neck of the man lying beside where Seo Jihyeok had been, and it was horrifying enough to make me want to look away. The blade of the scissors we had used to cut up the blanket at the convenience store—who knew when someone had taken them—was almost entirely embedded in his neck, while the flathead screwdriver Baek Aeyeong had been carrying had pierced straight through it. Whether viewed from up close or from a distance, the man was already dead.
There were scissors and a screwdriver stuck in a person’s neck. In a person’s neck.
When I reached out with trembling hands to examine the man, Yu Geum-i grabbed me and pulled me backward. I was dragged back helplessly by a hand far smaller than mine. From the neck of the man lying within my field of vision, blood kept trickling sideways in a tiny fountain about the size of a thumb. A pool continued to form beneath him.
I stared blankly at the places where the blood was flowing. There shouldn’t have been that much blood. Even if a tooth came out, it didn’t bleed that much. There shouldn’t have been that much blood.
My ears thudded like a beating heart. My chest felt tightly blocked, as if I couldn’t breathe, and I was terribly dizzy. Yu Geum-i was covering my eyes with her small hands, and the moment I thought that should have been impossible given her height, I realized I was sitting on the floor. Beside me, Sin Haeryang’s questions came rumbling into my ears. My vision went black.
Who the hell are you people?
Who’s the mastermind?
How many armed personnel are there at the undersea base?
How did you bring the guns in?
Even though it felt as if my vision were spinning in circles, the small hand covering my burning eyes was so cold that I felt a little sorry for her.
I took a canteen from my bag and drank some water, then blankly rolled a piece of candy around in my mouth. It was lemon-flavored. And sweet. I had seen so many people suffer from tooth decay that I had always stayed away from sweets.
Of course, that was also because I disliked sweet foods. I reacted strongly to sweetness, so even something only slightly sweet made my head ache with a sharp, tingling pain. I never touched chocolate, candy, or jelly. I didn’t often drink soda or other sweetened beverages, either. I hated alcohol. I had never smoked regularly. More precisely, some friends had given me cigarettes a few times, and I tried smoking for about a month, but it wasn’t for me and cost too much money, so I quit. In the past few hours, I had consumed more sugary foods than I usually did in several years combined. My teeth and pancreas must have been in shock. I was thinking that blankly when Yu Geum-i spoke.
“It’s because Muhyeon suddenly went through too much stress.”
“······ Everyone here must be under the same amount of stress.”
“But we’re not all the same people. Everyone handles stress differently. Everyone feels things differently, too. A spider crawling across my bed means nothing to me, but my younger brother would scream all over the place and try to burn down the entire room.”
Embarrassed by Yu Geum-i’s attempt to comfort me, I wiped my nose and the corners of my eyes with the back of my hand.
“Still, you seem to be holding up well, Geum-i.”
“······ Really? To be honest, I’m not doing all that well, either. I’m just······”
“Just?”
“Just enduring it.······ Blood is nothing. I see it normally. When I conduct experiments.”
“Ah······”
She was a researcher. I held my spinning head and tried to concentrate on what Yu Geum-i was saying.
“But it was my first time seeing that much blood come out of someone’s neck.”
“Right. It was my first time seeing scissors stuck in someone’s neck, too······”
“I think Jihyeok must have done that. I saw him hiding scissors inside the splint on his leg at the convenience store.”
“I see.”
“Yes.”
Silence fell for a while. After Yu Geum-i dragged me into the area near the kitchen, I quickly returned to normal simply by sitting there quietly. The face of the man whose eyes had rolled back with scissors and a screwdriver stuck in his neck was only a few meters away, but it was strange how merely not looking at him calmed my body. I must have been in a mild state of shock.
“Cheer up, Muhyeon. We somehow managed to get out of Undersea Base Four, after all.”
“······ You’re right. We were trapped in an elevator until just a little while ago.”
“Exactly. The elevator fell, and the two of us screamed together.”
Perhaps remembering that, Yu Geum-i gave a faint smile. I smiled a little, too. I felt much better. I wasn’t gasping for breath as though I were about to die, nor was I endlessly terrified like before. I suddenly looked at Yu Geum-i and spoke.
“Thank you, Geum-i. I’m coming to my senses thanks to you.”
“It was nothing.”
A small, cold hand gently patted my back. How embarrassing. I was a grown man with a perfectly healthy physique, not a child. The instant I realized that a woman younger and shorter than me was comforting me even though she was more frightened in this terrifying situation, I felt like going somewhere and dying from shame at my own patheticness. Ha. This was so humiliating. What the hell was I doing? Please, get a grip.
When we left the kitchen, it was impossible to tell whether the interrogation had ended or had simply stopped because we had come out. The dead man from earlier had been covered up to the chest with some kind of cloth, though I had no idea who had done it.
Seo Jihyeok was sitting with his back against the wall, aiming his gun at the man. Baek Aeyeong was doing the same, though she occasionally glanced around to keep watch rather than focusing solely on the man in front of her. Sin Haeryang kept his gun trained on the man and, without taking his eyes off him, spoke.
“······ First, taking the nearest elevator seems dangerous.”
“So these people are guarding the elevators up above?”
“Yes.”
And then, silence. After spending several hours with him, I finally understood. This was probably just how Sin Haeryang was. Unless you asked a precise question or requested an explanation, he told you nothing at all. I asked what I was most curious about.
“What kind of people are they?”
Seo Jihyeok seemed about to show us a shark-shaped mark that looked as if he had torn it off the dead man’s forearm with his left hand, but after noticing the blood splashed across it, he mumbled and hid it again. Seeing Seo Jihyeok’s actions, Sin Haeryang let out a low sigh and spoke.
“They’re a religion for people whose preference is the Greenland shark.”
“No! You blasphemous bastard!”
The man shouted angrily, but when he felt Baek Aeyeong’s gun muzzle pressed against the back of his head, he quieted down again. Yu Geum-i flinched at the voice and hid behind me. I was startled by her reaction as well, but calmed my racing heart and spoke.
“The three elements of a religion are its founder, doctrine, and organization, aren’t they? Who’s the founder—the person who created this religion?”
Rarely, Sin Haeryang appeared to be searching for an answer. The results of the interrogation didn’t seem to have been particularly fruitful. His eyes shifted from side to side before he finally said,
“····· Seems to be a mentally ill person who likes seafood.”
“Nooo!”
Baek Aeyeong pressed her muzzle against the back of the man’s head once, and he quieted down again. I asked Sin Haeryang another question.
“Then······ what’s their doctrine? The teachings of that religion.”
Sin Haeryang looked at the man in front of him, hesitated once more, and answered me as though even he found it vague.
“······ The mass slaughter of humanity?”
“You bastard!”
Baek Aeyeong now began tapping the back of the man’s head with the muzzle of her gun.
“Want a tiny hole that won’t heal opened in that big head of yours? Huh? I’ll make a hole and blow my breath through it, nice and slow.”
At Baek Aeyeong’s threat, the man didn’t know what to do with his rage. He ground his teeth furiously, but he seemed far more aggrieved by Sin Haeryang’s answer than by Baek Aeyeong’s actions. Sin Haeryang paid no attention to him and continued.
“They’re extremely exclusive and aggressive, with antisocial views, and they’re armed in front of the elevator at Undersea Base Two. They’re shooting everyone who comes up. We can’t trust this man’s answers, but if he’s telling the truth, there are roughly between eight and twenty of them.”
I frowned at the number of armed personnel, but when Yu Geum-i saw the shark on the man’s forearm, she also frowned.
“This means the Greenland shark, right?”
“······ Yes. You seem to be the smartest among these disbelievers. We are those who live alongside the immortal shark! We survive every danger and hardship!”
As though she found that ridiculous, Yu Geum-i said,
“If you get a bullet in your head or scissors in your neck, you die.”
The moment she said that, the man glared at Yu Geum-i. Yu Geum-i glared back, determined not to lose, but after a few seconds, perhaps because her eyes had dried out, she blinked several times and quietly hid behind me. Damn. Something got in my eye. Yu Geum-i rubbed her eye with the back of her hand and spoke from behind me.
“I have heard that there’s a religion that considers Greenland sharks over six hundred years old their friends and seeks an immortal life. Was its name······ the Old Shark Religion?”
“It’s the Infinity Church!”
As the man screamed, Seo Jihyeok looked around and kept watch. Yu Geum-i spoke as though she didn’t even notice his voice.
“Living forever is impossible!”
“You fool. Ignorance is a sin. Research into immortality is already well underway in places you know nothing about. Don’t speak carelessly about things you don’t understand!”
Yu Geum-i crossed her arms, apparently angry, and began to speak.
“Ah. There was someone like you in the laboratory I worked at. A complete idiot—the biggest idiot of them all. When the temperature drops, genes that suppress aging become active. To adapt and live in the freezing, subzero ocean, there’s no choice but to lower your metabolism and grow extremely slowly. The Greenland shark lives that long because it’s the only shark that lives in the coldest regions! Humans live only until the age of thirty-eight if they follow what’s written in their DNA! Even with the development of modern science and medicine, the human lifespan is limited to 150 years! If you threw a human into a subzero ocean like the Greenland shark’s habitat, their lifespan would be ten minutes! What do you mean, living forever? Living for two hundred years is impossible!”
“The Greenland shark is the longest-surviving vertebrate on Earth. Humans are vertebrates, too!”
At the man’s single piece of bullshit, Yu Geum-i—the marine biologist—looked as though her blood pressure had risen so high she might die.